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Thursday, June 16, 2016

Blog Tour: Loving Roxie by G.G. Vandagriff

Book Description:

Roxie Castro comes to Florence, Italy to help her friend Georgia heal after the death of her husband. While there she decides to chase her dream of being an author, collaborating with the gorgeous Professor Stefano Nae in researching the murder of Princess Isabela di Medici. However, when they begin to delve into her history, strange things start happening to Roxie: panic attacks, the resurfacing of buried memories, and a fear that something from her past has come forward to haunt her future.

The professor's help triggers her powerful attraction to him, and this in turn worsens the attacks.The closer they get to solving the mystery surrounding her past, the more tangled her emotions become. Will discovering Roxie’s secret finally free them to explore their newfound feelings or will it snatch away the one chance they have for a lasting love?

Book Review:

I've never read anything from G.G. Vandagriff before, even though I've heard she's a great Regency author. So, when I saw she was trying out a contemporary romance novel I thought I'd give it a go.
I definitely wasn't expecting it to deal with such heavy topics (the reasons for Roxie's panic attacks, and the behavior of Stefano's dead wife). I was expecting a light fluffy read, and this wasn't it.

I also had to laugh a little about how concerned Roxie is about her looks and how she judges Stefano for his. I can relate very little to this concern of hers, so I had a hard time with that. Plus, it mentioned in almost every chapter about her wearing jeans to look less attractive. Jeans....really? The baggy sweatshirts I understood, but the jeans? Sexy people wear jeans too, so I'm not sure what that was really accomplishing there.

I struggled a little with the phrasing of conversations. It almost seemed like it was trying to be contemporary, but kept coming out as Regency. I don't know how to describe it, it was just weird. By the end of the book Roxie is phrasing everything like the Italians, and she'd only been there for a little bit of time, didn't speak the language, and didn't spend all her time immersed with the language. It just kept holding me up, and I'd have to go back and reread somethings to make sure I was understanding it right.